The Essential Difference Between Leadership and Management

I have written in a previous posts on the differences between management and leadership and recently I can across an interesting article with an interesting take on the topic.

“Management can be taught. Leadership cannot be taught or learned, it must be earned.”

I like this perspective, it means that leadership is a choice, it’s the result of out attitudes, values, behaviors and our effectiveness. In a nutshell, it’s the results we achieve and how we go about achieving them.

“If one looks at management development literature, it is only over the last 15 - and particularly the last 10 - years that leadership is mentioned at all. Prior to that, leadership was mostly only assigned to historical political figures such as Napoleon, Churchill, Kennedy and so on. These were people who earned the title leader. Leader was never assigned to organizational supremos. Nor was it given to any manager. It seems that some writers, keen to establish what makes a great manager great, settled on the term leadership as a distinguishing factor. Then they tried to define it. Then we tried to measure it. Some of us even tried to teach it! And there our troubles began…… My contention is that one becomes a manager when one signs on for the job, be it head of the country, firm, school, department or first-line supervisor. One only becomes a leader when other people say so….. This definition of leadership, rather than focusing on the inputs, such as personal skills, characteristics, competencies, traits etc, focuses on the outputs. Managers are judged on their status as a leader in the eyes of their followers and stakeholders by what they do and achieve.”

In his research, Bob Selden, the author of “What To Do When You Become The Boss”, found the following four condition required to create the essence of leadership, these are the conditions required for others to follow, there needs to be:

• A shared understanding of the environment - ‘We know what we face‘
• A shared vision of where we are going - ‘We know what we have to do’
• A shared set of organizational values - ‘We are in this together‘
• A shared feeling of power - ‘We can do this‘

What I like about the above four conditions of leadership is that they are shared by the team and the organization. This view is consistent with Peter Senge who describes leadership as:

"a capacity in the human community to shape its future."

Although the leader makes a choice to create the conditions for leadership, once these conditions are in place, the community becomes empowered to take action towards the shared vision, the result is leadership.

"The wicked leader is he who people despise. The good leader is he who people revere. The great leader is he who the people say we did it ourselves." - Lao Tsu

Considering this perspective on management and leadership and the results of your management over the past year. Take some time to ask yourself the following questions:

• Have you made the choice to lead?
• Have you established the four conditions for leadership in your team?
• If not, what actions can you take over the next few weeks to establish these conditions in your team?